Dynamic bandwidth is an evolving technology for provisioning wide area networks (WANs). Database mirroring (i.e., data mirroring) is a requirement over multiple industries needing real time replication of production data. Bandwidth is expensive and the replication is “time critical.” Bandwidth is usually provisioned to meet a projected peak data demand and paid for over the course of a contract. Since peak demand occurs infrequently, bandwidth is over-provisioned for a significant amount of time. The over-provisioning of the bandwidth results in an extra cost to a customer who is paying for bandwidth over the course of a contract, because over time, the customer is usually paying for capacity that is not being used. Furthermore, since a projected peak data demand is utilized in bandwidth provisioning, a business performing better than expected may cause an actual peak data demand to be higher than the projected peak data demand, which results in the application slowing down due to an inability to satisfy the actual demand.
Dynamic Bandwidth Management services typically provide a bandwidth management technique in which bandwidth control is performed by a central network component that monitors traffic from multiple applications and guarantees bandwidth for critical applications while traffic for low priority applications is blocked.
Accordingly, there is a need to determine when and how much WAN bandwidth is to be allocated for an application which performs data mirroring or data replication via a dedicated channel, in order to avoid over-provisioning and under-provisioning bandwidth and without affecting the performance of the application.